Join me in a little thought experiment.
Suppose some conservative think tank were to propose a Darwinian immigration policy. No longer would people be admitted because they had applied properly and played by the rules; nor yet because they were judged to be in need of political asylum. Instead, as in some dystopian science fiction film, applicants would have to go through an obstacle course designed to weed out the weaklings. Some would die in the attempt. Many more would turn back, defeated. Only the most crafty and determined would win through, bringing their cunning to their new homeland and adding their ruthless DNA to its gene pool.
I think we can imagine how the Left would react to such an idea. The people proposing would be howled down as Nazis, hounded out of public life. And yet the process I have just described is becoming an increasingly common route into Britain, America and Europe.
When illegal immigrants elbow aside those who have queued patiently and those judged to be victims of repression, Leftists demand that they be allowed to stay.
It is even more paradoxical when we consider the status of clandestine immigrants. Unlike legal settlers, they cannot claim welfare and are not entitled to the minimum wage. Milton Friedman used to argue that this made them the most desirable form of immigrant: by definition, they had to be making a positive net contribution to GDP.
Yet, again, liberals mystifyingly demand that they be rewarded with amnesties.
What is going on in their minds? How can they have come to a policy that effectively contracts out a chunk of immigration policy to criminal gangs that smuggle human beings? I can only guess, but I suspect it has to do with the tendency of some Leftists to approach every question in terms of race.
I’ve noticed that this tendency is especially strong in the U.S. It’s difficult to discuss policing, prisons, drugs policy, higher education, free speech or (particularly) welfare without some pundit making it a race issue. For a certain kind of Leftist, the fact that many illegal immigrants are not white is the single most important fact about them, trumping everything else.
Listen, for example, to Francois Crepeau, the United Nation’s special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants: “It is remarkable that in most of our countries we have nothing against numerous Germans and French coming in and we dislike profoundly that people with darker skin colors are coming in. There are elements of racism in this nationalist, populist reaction to migration.”
Got that? If we want the law to be applied, and procedures to be properly followed, it’s because we’re really racists.
There are some differences between what is happening in the Mediterranean and what is happening on the US-Mexican border. Some of those reaching Europe are genuine refugees, having fled persecution or war. More to the point, under EU rules, it is impossible to turn away someone who calls himself an asylum seeker, however bogus his claim appears. If someone is picked up in international waters by an EU vessel, he must be landed in the EU. This is why Europe can’t do what Australia is doing very successfully: process asylum claims offshore.
In Britain, though, this problem doesn’t arise, since almost all those entering the country illicitly are doing so via France. Bluntly, not a single one of the largely African migrants encamped on the far side of the Channel Tunnel is a refugee — France has a great many problems, but it is not a state where someone might have a well-founded fear of persecution. Yet this hasn’t stopped Leftist demonstrators from Britain and Europe congregating around the migrant encampments and demonstrating in favor of their admission.
Logically, this can mean one of only two things. Either the demonstrators want the illegal migrants to get priority over legal applicants; or they want all borders to be fully open — in which case, by implication, they want the end of the welfare state.
Not that logic has much to do with it, of course. Far more relevant to the discussion is one’s ability to flaunt one’s imagined moral superiority. “Look-how-much-I-care-about-these-folks-not-like-you-nasty-racists!” It’s not really about the immigrants at all. It’s about the Left and their narcissism. It always is.
Dan Hannan is a British Conservative MEP.
